Is best defined as anything besides land grabbing? Cause that’s all they’re showing me how to do.
CKII is a game about making your own goals. Expansion is cool but also untenable most of the time. Of course, in CKII, you also need to always have an heir, and so there’s the fun of trying to raise a good heir and make good marriages.
But overall, given that the game doesn’t have a “Win state,” the main goal is to see how long you can last and to deal with the inevitable onslaught of invasions, rebellions, scheming, terrible heirs, etc.
Thought Crusader Kings isn’t Eurpean Universalis, which isn’t Victoria. The character focus in Crusader Kings makes it easier game to approach, in my opinion, as you can roleplay a bit and focus on being a king. That’s harder in EU.
Even in EU I think it’s possible to focus on trade and politics to make one’s country stronger, though those might be slower and quite boring compared to warfare. So at start it’s probably best to focus on aggressive expansion.
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I recent discovered the goal of Hearts of Iron IV (another Paradox Game but set in World War II) If you’re a fascist nation, grab as much land you can hold onto before the Allies declare they’re protecting all non-fascist nations. If you’re the Allies, curb stomp the fascist nation.
You could probably draw a through line from CK2 to EU4 to HOI4 to Stellaris if you were insane enough…
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So the goal is kind of do what you can. Try to see how far you can push everything. You can try to beat a nation’s historical score, or try to take over everything. Like a lot of sandbox games it’s kind of what you want to do. One of my favorite things to try is to resurrect Rome. It takes a lot but it’s doable!
Some people like to conquer the whole world with just Okinawa, it’s possible, and possibly the hardest thing to do in the game.
People absolutely have played the games in this way (Traditionally, it goes from CKII->EUIV (official converter), EUIV->Victoria II (fan-made converter), Victoria II->HOI3 or HOI4 (fan-made converter)). Mega-campaigns are nuts.
Thought this article was interesting, also was wondering whether it would be possible to do a “Small World or Vinci” mechanic, where you let your Empire die to be reborn and continue on with progress in a 4x game.
Wouldn’t that kind of be like a “New Game +” ? Starting a new civilization with some of the knowledge and whatnot from the previous civ?
A better route would be to take a page from wargames. The beardo types.
There’s the idea of separate victory conditions for different players, coupled with the idea of marginal victory (and marginal defeat).
So you have one player who “wins” if they hold the fortress for 11 weeks. They have a marginal “win” if they hold out until some other thing happens, a marginal “loss” if a particular unit is lost, etc…
Another player “wins” if they take the fortress, but only a marginal win if they end up committing too many troops to the effort, a marginal loss if they take the fortress but have destroyed too much of it, etc…
So rather than “one player wins, everyone else loses”, everyone wins or loses on their own terms, and the end state of the game is an interesting snapshot of the combined results of everyone’s efforts.
In Civ, imagine if I “win” because my people are happy, my borders secure, and I am still around at the end of the game. The jerk who’s conquering “wins” a different goal if they control enough of the world. Stuff like that.
Make the “endgame” a bunch of people striving for the best possible outcome for their people, and the end state a chart of what the world was like at the end.
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OMG someone please make this game.
Part of the problem I always have with 4X PC games, especially Civ, is that the beginning is way more fun than the end. The beginning I don’t have too much stuff to manage. I’m just starting out, taking land, doing fun stuff.
Then when the game gets deep, everything is too big. Too many cities, too many units. No more settling really. It becomes a different game. It’s tedious to manage it all, and way less fun.
A game where you collapsed and started from scratch 3+ times would be way fun. Just as your civ was getting to be big and cumbersome you reset and get all the fun of the beginning of the game all over again.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun also proposed in a previous review of Rise and Fall that it would be interesting to have a mode where you start as a glorious empire with destruction imminent. There is no victory, only a question of how long you can stand for.
One way you could do this is to separate the “winner” of a particular game of Civ from the score you get from playing. For example, assign more points for happy citizens and have a “stable” civ or a “smart” civ.
The end result being that a player could have a higher score for having a smaller, happier, and more stable civilization than someone who went the war monger route.
This is essentially Civilization Legacy, the PC version. That would be a cool game to play.
PC: Overwatch, Rocket League
3DS: Pokemon Sun Ultra
Mobile: SpaceFlight Simulator
Bizarrely, the first Switch only game I have given a single fuck about is Golf Story. I love this game so much.
Too many good games, not enough time.
Finally got Breath of the Wild.
Goodbye, friends. o7
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See you in 2 months
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Rock Paper Shotgun has a somewhat follow-up article where they interviewed Soren Johnson about his upcoming 4X game and some of the “problems” he sees with the genre: